Anyone who’s ever run a trail race while listening to an MP3 player on shuffle mode probably knows the feeling of hoping that a Rocky-esque song infused with deep meaning will start to play in the final stretch toward a summit. The last thing you want to hear as you push to the top is a saccharine duet by Zac Ephron and Vanessa Hudgens. My preteen daughter’s pop tunes tend to wind up in my music library, so that experience — the audio equivalent of having a nice walk ruined by stepping in dog poop — happens to me from time to time.

Thankfully, this is not about one of those times. (more…)

Starting the Mount Diablo 10K, with the woman behind me pushing the pace.

On Sunday, November 2, I was in the middle of a 10K race on Mount Diablo that felt like a nightmare. My feet were weighed down, I kept slipping and almost falling, and I was reduced to running in slow motion as though sloshing through waist-high water. The nightmare’s monster had a three-letter name: MUD. It grasped my soles and kept adding more and more clumps of clay until the bottom of each shoe was caked with at least six inches and five pounds of dark, sticky, cement-like soil. I could barely lift my knees, so I transformed my running into gliding, as though cross-country skiing. With each lift of each heel, I worried the earth would cling so tightly that my foot would pop out of the shoe. Halfway, around mile 3, I was in the lead but my closest competitor caught up. Our duel in the dirt would come down to which one of us could master the mud. (more…)